Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘trauma response’ names not a single phenomenon but a spectrum of adaptive — and subsequently maladaptive — organismic reactions to overwhelming experience. The literature divides broadly along three axes. The first concerns the architecture of the response itself: Herman establishes that the ‘ordinary human response to danger is a complex, integrated system of reactions, encompassing both body and mind,’ while Levine, Ogden, and Payne foreground its specifically somatic and autonomic dimensions, locating trauma in nervous-system dysregulation rather than in the event per se. The second axis concerns the typology of responses — fight, flight, freeze, collapse, and, more recently, fawn — each carrying distinct physiological signatures and therapeutic implications. Ogden’s work on sensorimotor psychotherapy demonstrates that even two survivors of the identical traumatic event may exhibit radically divergent response patterns, confirming that the ‘common denominator in trauma may be autonomic dysregulation outside of the window of tolerance.’ The third axis addresses chronicity: what begins as an adaptive survival maneuver calcifies into what Levine calls ‘fear-potentiated immobility’ and what Maté describes as the loss of ‘response flexibility.’ The therapeutic question animating the entire corpus is therefore not merely what the trauma response is, but how its arrested energies may be renegotiated, discharged, and integrated.